How do you make your landscape look so deep!

"Aye! Those train tracks are another symbol of the dangers of progress! Mankind is on the tracks with those lovely deer—do you think we will be run over by our own machines?"

"But how do you trick the eye—how does a flat canvas evoke miles of land?

"How do I make the engine surge forward? It is not my invention, of course. Give credit to the masters of the Renaissance! For it was those clever artists who invented linear perspective over five hundred years ago!

"Look at this painting from the Middle Ages. See how flat the scene looks? That's because the artist did not use linear perspective.

"Renaissance artists wanted to create an illusion of depth. So they studied the way the human eye perceives depth and developed a mathematical system called linear perspective. See the difference?

"Artists observed that parallel lines—the edges of this road, for example—seem to meet at the horizon and vanish. So they called it the vanishing point! Be a good laddie and click on the vanishing point in Mr. Picknell’s painting."